That rise is such bullshit, they’re looking at it through rose colored glasses. Yes, some things were better, the absence of predatory capitalism comes to mind first and foremost and even the Stasi knew less about us than Meta and Alphabet. The difference for me is in the how. Alphabet and Meta don’t bribe your friends, family and neighbors to actively spy on you and most importantly don’t disappear you for thought crimes. And the things that were great in the GDR… nearly none of that was due to the government. People stuck together and cooperated, you looked out for each other, if you found fresh beef at the butcher you’d get enough for your neighbors too, so they’d look out for you when they came across southern fruit or womens tights or west-cheese. And this feeling of community, of trust was actively undermined with the VEB Horch & Guck (“The peoples own company of Listen and Watch”, a nickname for the Stasi).
Holy shit I remember the wall coming down and how the former GDR was ransacked by western capital afterwards (because capital will always ruin everything) but I’d rather cut off my right foot than be trapped behind the no-mans-land of the death strip.
No, they’re looking at what life for regular people is like udner a capitalist regime.
And claiming that people stuck together in spite of the government is a real galaxy brain take there bud. The reality is that GDR’s socialist policies eliminated unemployment, provided cheap housing and childcare, and guaranteed basic necessities for everyone, which created material security is what allowed neighbors to look out for each other instead of competing for survival as they are forced to do under capitalism. The community you remember was a direct outcome of a system designed to put human needs above profit.
The wall was a defensive measure against a fascist West that was actively trying to undermine the GDR economically and politically as has been documented beyond all doubt. Meanwhile, the ransacking you witnessed after 1990 proved exactly what the GDR was protecting its citizens from. Dismissing all of that as rose-colored glasses is truly the height of intellectual dishonesty.
It’s always the people who got theirs and have zero empathy for the needs of others who praise the transition to capitalism in post Soviet states. You’re all telling on yourself there.
No, they’re looking at what life for regular people is like under a capitalist regime.
And I agree with that. Living in a capitalist hellscape is shit! Doesn’t mean it was better back then though. It sure was different, better in some ways but worse in others.
And the West didn’t shoot at people trying to flee and in the west your neighbors didn’t rat you out to the authorities for listening to radio from the other side. And it wasn’t the west that tore my family apart when the wall was build.
It’s always the people who got theirs and have zero empathy for the needs of others who praise the transition to capitalism in post Soviet states.
I have in not a single sentence praised the transition to capitalism, nor will I. What I do praise is the end of an authoritarian regime that oppressed it’s populace. And I have criticized the rose colored glasses of those who didn’t live in it. And to be clear: the west didn’t bring freedom and democracy to the GDR. The citizens demonstrating in Plauen and Leipzig and Berlin did that. (Which btw. is a good point against it being an illegitimate state, because reforms could have been possible if the old guard hadn’t resisted civil rights as much.) The GDR failed just when it’s citizens had enough of it and tried to reform it and civil rights activists gained more influence. Maybe it would have been a better place when it could have existed longer and reformed but the unwillingness of the old men leading the country to accept ANY change led to its implosion before it cozld fulfill its promises.
GDR was a socialist state where means of production were publicly owned, and that fundamentally made it better than the current capitalist state. Yes, it had its contradictions, but it also existed under immense pressure from the west. The west didn’t have to shoot people trying to flee because it had a massive economic advantage. It’s kind of hilarious for people to pretend that capitalists would take a moral high ground if the positions were reversed. Doubly so now that privacy and rights are being rolled back right across the western sphere.
I have in not a single sentence praised the transition to capitalism, nor will I.
I mean you just made a false equivalence to whitewash capitalism in the same comment. Also, anybody who uses the term authoritarian exposes themselves as having a deeply infantile understanding of politics.
All states are authoritarian by their very nature, they differ in being extensions of different classes class based on the type of social organization within the state. The extent to which any particular state exerts its authority depends on the given conditions and circumstances it finds itself in. The whole idea that a socialist system creates some latent desire for exerting authority at the helm is beyond absurd. What you have in practice are class dynamics and class struggle. Nazi Germany and modern Germany are both authoritarian bourgeoisie states. And the key difference between them is that nazi Germany was in economic crisis and needed to violently suppress the working class to protect property of the capital owning class. Those same circumstances are once again starting to crop up in modern Germany hence the stratospheric rise of AfD.
It’s also not possible to refer any liberal capitalist state a democracy in any meaningful sense. Liberalism consists of two main parts. First is political liberalism which focuses on wholesome ideas such as individual freedoms and democracy. Second is economic liberalism which centers around free markets, private property, and wealth accumulation. These two aspects form a contradiction. Political liberalism purports to support everyone’s freedom, while economic liberalism enshrines private property rights as sacred in laws and constitutions, effectively removing them from political debate.
As a result, liberalism justifies the use of state violence to safeguard property rights, over supporting ordinary people, which contradicts the promises of fairness and equality. Private property is seen as a key part of individual freedom under liberalism, and this provides the foundational justification for the rich to keep their wealth while ignoring the needs of everyone else. Thus, the talk of freedom and democracy ends up being nothing more than a fig leaf to provide cover for justifying capitalist relations. So, a liberal state cannot be democratic by its very definition.
The GDR failed because global fascist forces won a victory over USSR.
Uh… I don’t know why I would have to “out” myself. I’ve never been shy about where I stand politically. I’m a green progressive social democrat (to put it into terms even americans can understand) and it says so in my profile:
You’re somebody who unironically uses “nerd” as a slur, which is something I find far more damning and revealing.
That profile isn’t available on every client, btw.
Green progressive social democrat, so you are pro imperialist, pro NATO, pro rearmament, pro Israel, aka pro genocide, apartheid and settler colonialism, pro Ukraine war, pro Iran war, pro deportation, pro refugee camps on the borders of Europe, pro surveillance, pro destruction of the welfare state, pro destruction of worker rights, all mixed with a little bit of pro renewables and pro …ya, that’s it, what else, help me out here, I don’t see any other "pro"gressive things in current green or social democrat parties.
Forgive me for being a bit of an outsider, I thought socdem was essentially Democratic socialist, does it mean something else…?
Edit: just looked it up and it looks like a different thing than Democratic socialist but it certainly doesnt look fascism adjacent, am I missing something?
Ostensibly, social democrats believe in capitalism but want to borrow from socialist ideas to make it work. Democratic socialists are, ostensibly, anticapitalists who favor reform over revolution.
In practice, both groups protect capitalism. In practice, both groups side with fascism over socialism. In practice, you can ignore (especially Americans) those who call themselves demsocs and treat them as liberals.
There is a longer more complicated history around the term social democracy, but the short version is that beginning in the later 1800s, there arose two camps: reformist / pacifist / bourgeios socialists, and revolutionary ones. The reformist ones formed parties who, in every country they did so, ended up joining forces with capitalists to repress and put down the revolutionary ones. Every country has a long history of socdems doing this, as its been occurring since the 1800s when Marx and Engels noted this tendency.
That rise is such bullshit, they’re looking at it through rose colored glasses. Yes, some things were better, the absence of predatory capitalism comes to mind first and foremost and even the Stasi knew less about us than Meta and Alphabet. The difference for me is in the how. Alphabet and Meta don’t bribe your friends, family and neighbors to actively spy on you and most importantly don’t disappear you for thought crimes. And the things that were great in the GDR… nearly none of that was due to the government. People stuck together and cooperated, you looked out for each other, if you found fresh beef at the butcher you’d get enough for your neighbors too, so they’d look out for you when they came across southern fruit or womens tights or west-cheese. And this feeling of community, of trust was actively undermined with the VEB Horch & Guck (“The peoples own company of Listen and Watch”, a nickname for the Stasi).
Holy shit I remember the wall coming down and how the former GDR was ransacked by western capital afterwards (because capital will always ruin everything) but I’d rather cut off my right foot than be trapped behind the no-mans-land of the death strip.
No, they’re looking at what life for regular people is like udner a capitalist regime.
And claiming that people stuck together in spite of the government is a real galaxy brain take there bud. The reality is that GDR’s socialist policies eliminated unemployment, provided cheap housing and childcare, and guaranteed basic necessities for everyone, which created material security is what allowed neighbors to look out for each other instead of competing for survival as they are forced to do under capitalism. The community you remember was a direct outcome of a system designed to put human needs above profit.
The wall was a defensive measure against a fascist West that was actively trying to undermine the GDR economically and politically as has been documented beyond all doubt. Meanwhile, the ransacking you witnessed after 1990 proved exactly what the GDR was protecting its citizens from. Dismissing all of that as rose-colored glasses is truly the height of intellectual dishonesty.
It’s always the people who got theirs and have zero empathy for the needs of others who praise the transition to capitalism in post Soviet states. You’re all telling on yourself there.
And I agree with that. Living in a capitalist hellscape is shit! Doesn’t mean it was better back then though. It sure was different, better in some ways but worse in others.
And the West didn’t shoot at people trying to flee and in the west your neighbors didn’t rat you out to the authorities for listening to radio from the other side. And it wasn’t the west that tore my family apart when the wall was build.
I have in not a single sentence praised the transition to capitalism, nor will I. What I do praise is the end of an authoritarian regime that oppressed it’s populace. And I have criticized the rose colored glasses of those who didn’t live in it. And to be clear: the west didn’t bring freedom and democracy to the GDR. The citizens demonstrating in Plauen and Leipzig and Berlin did that. (Which btw. is a good point against it being an illegitimate state, because reforms could have been possible if the old guard hadn’t resisted civil rights as much.) The GDR failed just when it’s citizens had enough of it and tried to reform it and civil rights activists gained more influence. Maybe it would have been a better place when it could have existed longer and reformed but the unwillingness of the old men leading the country to accept ANY change led to its implosion before it cozld fulfill its promises.
GDR was a socialist state where means of production were publicly owned, and that fundamentally made it better than the current capitalist state. Yes, it had its contradictions, but it also existed under immense pressure from the west. The west didn’t have to shoot people trying to flee because it had a massive economic advantage. It’s kind of hilarious for people to pretend that capitalists would take a moral high ground if the positions were reversed. Doubly so now that privacy and rights are being rolled back right across the western sphere.
I mean you just made a false equivalence to whitewash capitalism in the same comment. Also, anybody who uses the term authoritarian exposes themselves as having a deeply infantile understanding of politics.
All states are authoritarian by their very nature, they differ in being extensions of different classes class based on the type of social organization within the state. The extent to which any particular state exerts its authority depends on the given conditions and circumstances it finds itself in. The whole idea that a socialist system creates some latent desire for exerting authority at the helm is beyond absurd. What you have in practice are class dynamics and class struggle. Nazi Germany and modern Germany are both authoritarian bourgeoisie states. And the key difference between them is that nazi Germany was in economic crisis and needed to violently suppress the working class to protect property of the capital owning class. Those same circumstances are once again starting to crop up in modern Germany hence the stratospheric rise of AfD.
It’s also not possible to refer any liberal capitalist state a democracy in any meaningful sense. Liberalism consists of two main parts. First is political liberalism which focuses on wholesome ideas such as individual freedoms and democracy. Second is economic liberalism which centers around free markets, private property, and wealth accumulation. These two aspects form a contradiction. Political liberalism purports to support everyone’s freedom, while economic liberalism enshrines private property rights as sacred in laws and constitutions, effectively removing them from political debate.
As a result, liberalism justifies the use of state violence to safeguard property rights, over supporting ordinary people, which contradicts the promises of fairness and equality. Private property is seen as a key part of individual freedom under liberalism, and this provides the foundational justification for the rich to keep their wealth while ignoring the needs of everyone else. Thus, the talk of freedom and democracy ends up being nothing more than a fig leaf to provide cover for justifying capitalist relations. So, a liberal state cannot be democratic by its very definition.
The GDR failed because global fascist forces won a victory over USSR.
You’ve outed yourself as an anticommunist.
Uh… I don’t know why I would have to “out” myself. I’ve never been shy about where I stand politically. I’m a green progressive social democrat (to put it into terms even americans can understand) and it says so in my profile:
You’re somebody who unironically uses “nerd” as a slur, which is something I find far more damning and revealing.
I’d ask you to elaborate on why you think “nerd” is a slur, but I’m a bit afraid of the psychic damage your liberal brain worms might conjure up.
So I’ll do this instead: shut up, anticommunist nerd.
That profile isn’t available on every client, btw.
Green progressive social democrat, so you are pro imperialist, pro NATO, pro rearmament, pro Israel, aka pro genocide, apartheid and settler colonialism, pro Ukraine war, pro Iran war, pro deportation, pro refugee camps on the borders of Europe, pro surveillance, pro destruction of the welfare state, pro destruction of worker rights, all mixed with a little bit of pro renewables and pro …ya, that’s it, what else, help me out here, I don’t see any other "pro"gressive things in current green or social democrat parties.
checks out given that Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism
Forgive me for being a bit of an outsider, I thought socdem was essentially Democratic socialist, does it mean something else…?
Edit: just looked it up and it looks like a different thing than Democratic socialist but it certainly doesnt look fascism adjacent, am I missing something?
Ostensibly, social democrats believe in capitalism but want to borrow from socialist ideas to make it work. Democratic socialists are, ostensibly, anticapitalists who favor reform over revolution.
In practice, both groups protect capitalism. In practice, both groups side with fascism over socialism. In practice, you can ignore (especially Americans) those who call themselves demsocs and treat them as liberals.
There is a longer more complicated history around the term social democracy, but the short version is that beginning in the later 1800s, there arose two camps: reformist / pacifist / bourgeios socialists, and revolutionary ones. The reformist ones formed parties who, in every country they did so, ended up joining forces with capitalists to repress and put down the revolutionary ones. Every country has a long history of socdems doing this, as its been occurring since the 1800s when Marx and Engels noted this tendency.
What about social democracy / democratic socialism / the Nordic model? Isn’t Sweden socialist?
Some more links: